Not all of my books are connected to each other. Four are part of the same series (the Outsiders series). Two others are part of a different series (the Bavarian Woods series). Liars’ Games, The Handyman, and Breadcrumbs and Bombs are, so far, standalone books. I’m working on sequels to those.

The setting for Inherit the Past originated from a visit to Germany thirty years ago, when one of my uncles drove my mother and me across the country to visit another of his sisters. He stopped outside the gate to a medieval town, but said we didn’t have time to explore. I was in awe of what I could see, peaking through the gate, and vowed I would one day go back and visit that town properly. When it came time to write Inherit the Past, I still had not gone back to visit, but I hadn’t forgotten the town. It inspired me. I researched that town and others like it and then created by own version for the story. A few years after the book came out, I actually got to go to that town and walk all they way around it on the town’s wall walkway.

One of my aunts, my mother’s sister, talked to me about what it was like living in the former Sudetenland when she and my mother were small children. She told me about them being forced to walk away from their home, carrying suitcases and fearing what would happen to them. They were taken to an internment camp temporarily. She wanted their story to be told in a book, but she lived far away from me and couldn’t get all the information to me. She passed away almost two years ago. I didn’t get enough information to write her story, so what I wrote instead was a fictional story, Breadcrumbs and Bombs, about families who lived in the Sudetenland and Germany during the war. I hope that she would have liked what I wrote.

The very first book I ever wrote was never published and never will be, but from that book came Liars’ Games. It has some of the same characters from that first book, and it has the same setting, but the story is entirely different. That’s why I tell new writers to never throw away something they have written.

I have several other books that are in various stages of writing. Some I may finish, but others maybe not.